Christopher Marlowe 1564 1593 Biography and Plays His

Christopher Marlowe 1564 -1593 Biography and Plays

His Life • He precedes Shakespeare a little bit chronologically and in reputation - just by a few years. • They knew each other. • They're contemporaneous, roughly. • He was kind of the go-to guy for tragedies for a long time in London. • He was also a crazy fascinating person. • His biographical details are muddied, which is just perfect because it makes people able to fight about him today.

His Life • What kind of things do they argue about? • There's tons of accusations and illicit information about Marlowe. • Some of it is confirmed; some of it is not at all confirmed. • People say that he was a spy for England, that he was a traitor, that he was an atheist, that he was a homosexual. . . (Can you imagine such things? !)

His Life • A few people even think that Marlowe was Shakespeare, or that Shakespeare was Marlowe. • They claim that Marlowe faked his own death and then continued to write as Shakespeare, or that Shakespeare found fame under the assumed name before he used his own. • There's all sorts of crazy accusations about that. • Those are probably not true, but he and Shakespeare enigmatic enough figures that you can say stuff like this and no one can really say that you're wrong.

His Life • Here's what we do know: Marlowe was baptized in Canterbury in 1564, so he was born some time around then. • He got a Bachelor of Arts degree, and then a master's, from Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. • When he was there, we know that he served the English government in some secret capacity because there's a letter from Elizabeth's administration that was written to the school about his master's degree. • What he actually did, we don't know, but lots of people think he was a spy.

His Life • Regardless of his other employments, he was an incredibly popular and influential playwright. • He wrote in blank verse, which is just unrhymed iambic pentameter. • Only two of his works were actually published during his lifetime; everything else was published posthumously. • In addition to plays, he wrote some poems and translations of Latin works.

His Plays Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587) • This is believed to be Marlowe's first performed play, although record-keeping was not so good back then, so we can never be sure. • It's based on three early books of the Roman poet Virgil's epic The Aeneid. • It's about a crazy queen who falls in love with Virgil's hero, Aeneas, • and, when he spurns her to continue on his mission, she commits suicide. • We can already see that Marlowe didn't really shy away from racy and offensive themes - he just dove right in. • This was first performed by a company of young boy actors sometime between 1587 -1593.

His Plays Tamburlaine the Great (1587) • This is Marlowe's first proper London production, probably in 1587. • This again takes on classical source material; Tamburlaine is about an Asian emperor Timur the Lame (which sounds a lot like Tamburlaine). • He kind of clawed his way up from being a shepherd to being a ruler. • Scholars celebrate this play as a turning point in Elizabethan drama because it introduces rich language, complex plotting, and complex themes - things that hadn't really been seen before on the London stage. • It was so successful that it was followed by a sequel, and these two plays were the only ones that were actually published during his lifetime.

His Plays The Jew of Malta (1592) • Not an awesome name by today's standards; this was first performed in 1592. • It tells the tale of a merchant, the titular Jew named Barabas, who basically plots revenge against Malta, which is the country where he lives, because they made him penniless. • They stole all of his stuff. • It's got these political and ethical complications that make one of Marlowe's favorite themes - ambiguous protagonists - super relevant to this play.

His Plays The Jew of Malta (1592) • His good guys aren't always good - they don't always seem to be perfectly good - but we kind of sympathize with them anyway, even if they're Jewish. • This one's one of those ones that's hard to read - we're not sure what audiences would have made of it then or what Marlowe intentions really were with this character. • What we do know is that it definitely influenced Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, which is also about a Jewish merchant getting his revenge.

His Plays The Massacre at Paris (1593) • Another great title - his titles really let you know what they're going to be about. • This one's about the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris in 1572. • Given its violent political topics, the play was actually thought to be dangerous, so there aren't actually any complete editions of the work that were published or reproduced. • People thought it was a little too political. • Segments drawn from memory is all the evidence that we have of it.

His Plays Doctor Faustus (1592) • The story itself is made more famous by the German writer Goethe, but Marlowe is the first one to actually bring it to the stage. • Big surprise, this story is about a guy who sells his soul to the Devil in order to get knowledge, power, and a visitation from sexy Helen of Troy. • This was another controversial Marlowe work. • Some folks were uneasy with its questions about thenpopular doctrine of predestination and also about its unapologetic presentation of sin and demons and whatnot.

His Plays Doctor Faustus (1592) • The play also presents difficulties for modern scholars because it's edited after Marlowe's death, most likely. • There's two versions of the play - we don't really know which is the right one. • There's a lot of teasing apart that they have to do to figure out what was really Marlowe's intention behind this.

His End • Like much of his life, the death of Christopher Marlowe is a huge mystery wrapped in an enigma. • We know he was stabbed to death in 1593; that's what the coroner said. • But the whys and wherefores of this are pretty questionable. • The death came at the hands of a known government spy and con-man just a couple days after Marlowe was arrested for heresy.

His End • He was never actually found guilty of heretical acts, but this might have been a way for the government to exact their punishment anyway. • Or it might have been a bar fight that escalated that was the official report. • Or maybe Marlowe wasn't dead at all and faked it to get the government off his back. • Or maybe he's still not dead. Or maybe he was Shakespeare!